There isn’t much in the way of clutter in Hans Holzgartner’s office at the Bentley headquarters in Crewe, in the north-west of England. The product manager of the brand’s Mulsanne line has gone almost entirely paperless in recent years. But one thing he does have on his desk is a copy of the Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
These are wise words to live by when you are creating cars at the very upper echelons of the motoring industry. As Steve Jobs famously taught us, there’s much to be said for giving customers what they think they want, with extras they didn’t know they needed.
“Regardless of what line of work they are in, someone who is coming to buy a Mulsanne is at the top of their game. These people have reached a stage in their lives where they can achieve anything they want with a single phone call – and so they expect their cars to behave in the same way. Their lives are effortless and they expect their cars to be the same. It’s in that context that I have to deliver things that delight people – and that perhaps they don’t expect,” Holzgartner tells me when we meet in Dubai.
When Bentley launched its first Mulsanne in 2010, the aim was to offer a new flagship that was a distillation of the brand’s DNA. “We did a study of all the significant Bentleys going back to the 1930s and we documented everything that we thought made those cars special. We found that luxury for Bentley didn’t have to be fussy. It was much more about clean, simple surfaces that allow the materials to shine.”
The Mulsanne has been given a €150 million (Dh585m) upgrade for 2017 and, for the first time, is being offered in an Extended Wheelbase version. I test the Mulsanne EWB a few days after it arrives in Dubai, sinking expectantly into my seat in the back of the car – because this is where Mulsanne EWB owners are supposed to be. This is a car for those who expect to be driven, not those who drive themselves. To that effect, the Mulsanne EWB is all about the rear cabin. Hence the extra 250 millimetres of legroom, and the fact that the sunroof has been shifted to provide more light for passengers in the back. And hence the focus on creating what Holzgartner proudly refers to as “the most comfortable sleeper seat in the market”.
For this latest iteration of the Mulsanne, the design cues come straight from first class travel. At the touch of a button, the seat extends outwards, offering support to the entire length of your leg. There is a massage function, of course, but also the option to include a stowage bin in the side of the passenger door, where you can store your shoes (or a pair of slippers, should you so desire). The seat is topped by an airline-style headrest that curls around your head and is bolstered with a super-soft Alcantara leather pad.
In another nod to luxury travel, screens, fitted with a new multimedia infotainment system, slide seamlessly up out of the back of the front seats, and can be stowed away when not in use; 4G Wi-Fi is available as standard. “In some of our competitors’ cars lower down the price range, a lot of customers would still be working quite hard, almost 24/7, so they treat their car like a mobile office. Whereas, once people get to Mulsanne level, what they want is a quiet place to think; they want somewhere to relax in between meetings or entertaining. They are not on their laptops banging out emails all day. But they still want the technology, so that when they need it, it’s there, but it’s not necessarily in their face all the time.”
The focus with this new Mulsanne might be on comfort, but that doesn’t detract from performance. The Mulsanne EWB has a 6.75-litre twin-turbocharged V8 engine, offering the same 505 horsepower and 752 pound-feet of torque as the short-wheelbase car. “Under the surface of the car, we’ve done a lot of work on suspension refinement and the way the engine is mounted into the body. Our customers might not care about this, but the effect is to dramatically lower the cabin noise levels. The car was quiet before, but it’s ridiculously quiet now. We’ve dropped the noise levels by about 4 decibels in the cabin, which is actually quite a lot. People are telling us that this is the benchmark now.”
And, says Holzgartner, “it doesn’t hang about”, going from zero to 100kph in 5.5 seconds.
There was always the danger that the EWB would end up looking like an unnaturally stretched version of a standard Mulsanne. Not so. The roof has been raised by a mere 10mm, but it’s enough to ensure the proportions remain balanced.
For the 2017 Mulsanne, Holzgartner set out to give the car a much stronger road presence. It looks wider and lower: the corners of the front have been pulled out at the bottom, creating the illusion of added width, and the grille has been extended and fitted with new vertical veins.
The beauty of this Bentley lies in the most minuscule of details – you can feel it in the weight of the ashtrays; in the polished stainless steel of the buttons, switches and controls; in the side curtains that are the very definition of blackout; and in the quality of the leather (15 full hides are used to trim the interior of the car, in a choice of 24 colours) and the wood set, which takes somewhere in the region of 75 to 80 man-hours to handcraft. “We just don’t do plastic in the Mulsanne,” Holzgartner says.
“It’s a beautiful place to be,” he adds. And I can’t help but agree.
Read this and more stories in Luxury magazine, out with The National on Thursday, December 8.
sdenman@thenational.ae
